50 THE NEW YORKER, SEPTEMBER 7, 2015
several head of cattle had frozen to
death, several communities away, six
years earlier. In the courtroom, they
provided prophetic direction, caution-
ing that a suspect would soon topple a
child, or cause a woman to levitate.
Minutes later, the victim's feet rose from
the floor. With their help, at least sixty
witches had been deposed and jailed
by the end of the month, more than
the Massachusetts prisons had ever ac-
commodated. Those who had frozen
through the winter began to roast in
the sweltering spring.
On May 27th, the new Massachu-
setts governor, Sir William Phips, estab-
lished a special court to try the witch-
craft cases. He assembled on the bench
nine of the "people of the best prudence
and figure that could be pitched upon."
At its head he installed his lieutenant
governor, sixty-year-old William Stough-
ton. A political shape-shifter, Stoughton
had served in five prior Massachusetts
regimes. He had helped to unseat the
reviled royal governor, on whose coun-
cil he sat and whose courts he headed.
He possessed one of the finest legal minds
in the colony.
The court met in early June, and sen-
tenced the first witch to hang on the
tenth. It also requested a bit of guidance.
During the next days, twelve ministers
conferred. Cotton Mather drafted their
reply, a circumspect, eight-paragraph
document, delivered mid-month. Ac-
knowledging the enormity of the crisis,
he issued a paean to good government.
He urged "exquisite caution." He warned
of the dangers posed to those "formerly
of an unblemished reputation."
In the lines that surely received the
greatest scrutiny, Mather reminded the
justices that convictions should not rest
purely on spectral evidence---evidence
visible only to the enchanted, who con-
versed with the Devil or with his con-
federates. Mather would insist on the
point throughout the summer. Other
considerations must weigh against the
suspected witch, "inasmuch as 'tis an un-
doubted and a notorious thing" that a
devil might impersonate an innocent,
even virtuous, man. Mather wondered
whether the entire calamity might be re-
solved if the court discounted those tes-
timonies. With a sweeping "neverthe-
less"---a word that figured in every 1692
Mather statement on witchcraft---he
then executed an about-face. Having ad-
vised "exquisite caution," he endorsed
a "speedy and vigorous prosecution."
Amonth later, Ann Foster, a seventy-
two-year-old widow from neighbor-
ing Andover, submitted to the first of sev-
eral Salem interrogations. Initially, she de-
nied all involvement with sorcery. Soon
enough, she began to unspool a fantasti-
cal tale. The Devil had appeared to her as
an exotic bird. He promised prosperity,
along with the gift of a icting at a glance.
She had not seen him in six months, but
her ill-tempered neighbor, Martha Car-
rier, had been in touch on his behalf.
At Carrier's direction, Foster had be-
witched several children and a hog. She
worked her sorcery with poppets. Carrier
had announced a Devil's Sabbath in May,
arranging their trip by air. There were
twenty-five people in the meadow, where
a former Salem village minister o ciated.
Three days later, from jail, Foster added
a malfunctioning pole and a mishap to
her account.The pole had snapped as the
women flew, causing them to crash, Fos-
ter's leg crumpling beneath her.
She appeared entirely coöperative, both
in a jail interview with a minister and be-
fore her interrogators. The justices soon
learned that Foster had failed to come
clean, however. It seemed that she and
Carrier had neither flown nor crashed
alone on that Salem-bound pole: a third
rider had travelled silently behind Foster.
So divulged forty-year-old Mary Lacey,
a newly arrested suspect, on July 20th.
Foster had also withheld the details of a
chilling ceremony. The Devil had bap-
tized his recruits, dipping their heads in
water, six at a time. He performed the
sacrament in a nearby river, to which he
had carried Lacey in his arms. On July 21st,
Ann Foster appeared before the magis-
trates for the fourth time. That hearing
was particularly sensational: Mary Lacey,
who supplied the details missing from
Foster's account, was her daughter.
"Did not you know your daughter to
be a witch?" one justice asked Foster. She
did not, and seemed taken aback. Mary
Warren, a pretty, twenty-year-old servant,
helpfully chimed in, a less dramatic wit-
ness at Foster's hearing than she appeared
on other occasions, when blood trickled
from her mouth or spread across her bon-
net. Warren shared with the court what
a spectre had confided in her: Foster had
recruited her own daughter. The author-
ities understood that she had done so
about thirteen years earlier. Was that cor-
rect? "No, and I know no more of my
daughter's being a witch than what day
I shall die upon," Foster replied, sound-
ing as unequivocal as she had been on the
details of the misbegotten Salem flight.
A magistrate coaxed her: "You cannot ex-
pect peace of conscience without a free
confession." Foster swore that if she knew
anything more she would reveal it.
At this, Mary Lacey was called. She
berated her mother: "We have forsaken
Jesus Christ, and the Devil hath got hold
of us. How shall we get clear of this evil
one?" Under her breath, Foster began to
pray. "What God do witches pray to?" a
justice needled. "I cannot tell, the Lord
help me," the befuddled old woman re-
plied, as her daughter delivered fresh de-
tails of their flight to the village green
and of the satanic baptism. Her mother,
Lacey revealed, rode first on the stick.
Court o cers removed the two older
women and escorted Lacey's seventeen-
year-old daughter, Mary Lacey, Jr., into
the room. Mary Warren fell at once into
fits. At first, the younger Lacey was un-
helpful. "Where is my mother that made
me a witch and I knew it not?" she cried,
a yet more disturbing question than the
one posed in June, when a suspect won-
dered whether she might be a witch and
not know it. Asked to smile at Warren
without hurting her, Mary Lacey failed.
Warren collapsed to the floor. "Do you
acknowledge now that you are a witch?"
Lacey was asked. She could only agree,
although she seemed to be working from
a di erent definition: a recalcitrant child,
she had caused her parents plenty of
trouble. She had, she insisted, signed no
diabolical pact.
The ideal Puritan girl was a sterling
amalgam of modesty, piety, and tire-
less industry. She was to speak neither
too soon nor too much. She read her
Scripture twice daily. Increase Mather
warned that youths who disregarded their
mothers could expect to "come to the
gallows, and be hanged in gibbets for the
ravens and eagles to feed upon them."
The attention to a youngster's spiritual
state intensified at adolescence, when
children became simultaneously more
capable of reason and less reasonable.
Fourteen was the dividing line in law,